shallow reaction to a serious issue

[psocoptera]

So this bullied 14-year-old was given $40000 worth of plastic surgery by a charitable foundation and one could say all sorts of things about our cultural priorities and conformity and indeed that article says some of them, but damn, all I can think looking at this picture is how way much better she looked to me before the surgery.



Obviously Nadia Ilse's face belongs just to her, and it's up to her (and her parents, as she's a minor, and the medical service providers doing the work) what she does with it, she certainly doesn't owe it to *me* to look one way or the other. But, dang. A year of college tuition, to take everything interesting about her face and try to make it as generic as possible? And end up looking... *wrong* around the eyes somehow, although admittedly that might be the terrible eyebrows, which she could presumably grow out again.

So this makes me wonder... what if I did find the "improved" version more attractive? Would I still find conformity to the beauty standard so distasteful, if the beauty standard were somehow magically more aligned with my own aesthetic opinions? Hrm.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

So, one thing to note is that the lighting is very different in the two pictures. The first has fairly natural overhead light, so there are plenty of shadows, while the second was clearly taken with an on-camera flash, which tends to wash everything out. So some of what you're seeing may be things that haven't actually changed at all, but look different because the shadows aren't there. To me, the only things that I'm certain have changed are her ears and her eyebrows; it's possible that there are other minor changes, but I could easily believe that everything else is just the lighting. Oh, and the second one also appears to be slightly out of focus, so it's a worse picture on a number of levels.

As an aside, I believe OKCupid ran some stats at one point and determined that, on average, people who had pictures on the site taken with an SLR were much more likely to be contacted than those with pictures taken by compact cameras, who in turn did much better than people with pictures taken with cell phones. Photo quality matters a lot for perceived attractiveness.

[q10.livejournal.com]

there are a few possible explanations of that OKCupid thing that have nothing to do with photo quality. for example, SLRs are expensive, and therefore people with more money are probably more likely to have them. since people tend to get these photos taken by friends and tend to have friends of similar wealth levels to their own, it seems plausible that richer and/or higher-class people are more likely to have their photos taken with SLRs. maybe richer people also have more resources to devote to their appearances.

i think a story along those lines has a lot of potential to handle some of the idiosyncrasies of the stats. for example, Leica point-n-shoots on average took more attractive pictures than the leading SLR brands, and much more attractive pictures than other point-n-shoots. now, at the time, i'm pretty sure every point-n-shoot sold as a Leica was a high-end Panasonic point-n-shoot on the inside, with case design and branding by Leica, sold at a substantial mark-up (this is still mostly true, with one or two exceptions). so, basically, buying a Leica point-n-shoot meant paying a substantial premium for a functionally identical product that was a more prestigious fashion statement. is it any wonder that the people who would make that call had friends who were judged more attractive? (relatedly, at the time, Kodak was a low-prestige digital camera brand, Panasonic interchangeable-lens cameras were new and trendy, and so on.)

[prof-fran.livejournal.com]

I think her face before was beautiful too--in part because it has "character". I suspect that she would have grown into her own face if given a chance but I get too that bullying can take away the chance to feel good in your own skin. I wonder if it is also that I see in her "imperfections" some of my own daughter's "imperfections"--the ears that are seem too large and out from the head especially--and because I love my Bean, I don't see them as bad on Nadia.

[jaipur.livejournal.com]

hear hear. Her ears were fine!!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Your daughter is beautiful - or, heck, I apparently have no idea what that means in our society, so, I don't know, I think she's nice to look at. (Possibly relatedly, I have no idea what the objection is about ears. Josh's mom has mentioned not liking it that her ears stick out, or that she hopes our kids don't get her ears, or something. What's wrong with visible ears? People are supposed to have ears!)

[irilyth]

To my mind, the really awful part of this is that the solution to "a funny-looking girl was getting bullied" is "make her less funny-looking". Sure, no one's going to actually stand up and say "it's fine to bully weird people", but apparently these people are willing to say "...but maybe if you weren't so weird, you wouldn't get bullied", and that's fucked up. :^(

(I've also now skimmed the article from The Nation, which I hadn't realized was critical of the story.)

[cereph.livejournal.com]

agreed.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly! They've basically inadvertently told her "Wow, you're so pathetic that a charity will take pity on you and pay for the expensive surgery it will take for you to be able to go out in public without being picked on."

[rahirah]

So the kids who were taunting her now go taunt someone else whose parents either won't or can't go the plastic surgery route. Somehow I think this 'solution' is addressing the wrong elements of the problem.

[prisminawindow.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of mystified by the assumption that this would even stop the bullying in her case. When people are bullied about something this trivial, it usually has its roots in interpersonal dynamics rather than the ostensible subject of the teasing. There are definitely popular girls who are much less conventionally pretty than she is in the first picture (although they usually still wear make-up and dress the way their clique does, etc.). In fact, she may now just get teased for being the weirdo who has expensive surgery to deal with bullying. If this is effective at stopping the bullying, it may be as much because of other indirect factors -- e.g., people feeling bad when they realize that this hurt her enough to motivate surgery, her increased confidence, etc.

[jaipur.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what I was thinking--it's not her face they were necessarily picking on. Kids will pick on *anything*, particularly if the first randomly thrown dart gets a satisfactory response from the victim. Fixing her *face* is hardly the problem.